Leveraging Vercel and the AI SDK to deliver a seamless, AI-powered experience as a solo founder

ChatPRD is an AI co-pilot designed for product managers, enabling them to write product requirements documents, brainstorm roadmaps, and improve overall efficiency around product work. As a solo founder, Claire Vo built ChatPRD from the ground up. In just nine months, the platform has garnered 20,000 users and is now focusing on expanding its features to support team collaboration.

Central to this rapid growth and development has been the AI SDK on Vercel.

Challenges as a solo founder

Building a product from scratch as a solo founder presents unique challenges, especially when aiming to create a highly efficient, performant, and user-friendly application. For ChatPRD, one of the key hurdles was implementing advanced AI capabilities without getting bogged down in the complexities of model integration, latency issues, and the overall user experience. Claire needed a solution that would allow her to focus on building the product's core functionalities.

Vercel and the AI SDK

Vercel is the backbone of ChatPRD's infrastructure. By leveraging Vercel, Claire was able to deploy and host ChatPRD without having to worry about infrastrcuture, allowing her to concentrate on building the product. Additionally, Vercel’s logging and high-level monitoring tools provided just enough insight to keep things running smoothly without overwhelming her with unnecessary details.

The real productivity gains came from the AI SDK. ChatPRD's core functionality relies heavily on AI-driven assistance and tools, utilizing GPT-4 Omni as its primary model. The Vercel AI SDK provided a developer-friendly wrapper that simplified the implementation of streaming responses and streaming UI components—key features that significantly improved the perceived user experience by reducing latency. Specifically, ChatPRD uses the streaming features of the AI SDK to let users import a PDF or document, parse it with an LLM, and output into a structured template (JSON) that can be used in other chats to generate docs.

Claire highlighted that without the Vercel AI SDK, implementing these capabilities would have required building a lot of additional infrastructure to handle streaming and generative UI components. The SDK abstracted this complexity, making it easier to deploy and iterate on the product, ultimately accelerating ChatPRD’s time to market.

“Perceived (low) latency is one of the killer features of the chat. Once I implemented streaming with the AI SDK, user satisfaction went up as well as sign ups. It had a measurable impact on our business.Perceived (low) latency is one of the killer features of the chat. Once I implemented streaming with the AI SDK, user satisfaction went up as well as sign ups. It had a measurable impact on our business.”

Claire Vo, Founder of ChatPRD

The results and next steps for ChatPRD

The combination of Vercel's platform and the Vercel AI SDK enabled Claire to build ChatPRD quickly and confidently. The product’s AI-driven features, particularly the streaming and generative UI components, have delivered a "wow" experience for users, contributing to its rapid adoption and growth.

Leveraging Vercel and the Vercel AI SDK has allowed ChatPRD to scale as a modern SaaS product. For solo founders or small teams, these tools offer the efficiency, performance, and ease of use needed to focus on delivering exceptional user experiences without getting entangled in technical complexities.